26 January 2014

"The H Open" is Closed and Offline; Here's What I Aim to Do...

Long-time readers of this blog may recall that for some years I wrote for the UK Heise title "The H Open".  Sadly, that closed last year; even more sadly, Heise seems to have taken its archive off line.  That raises all sorts of interesting questions about the preservation of digital knowledge, and the responsibility of publishers to keep titles that they have closed publicly accessible - not least to minimise link-rot.

However, here I want to concentrate on the question of what I, personally, can do about this.  After all, however minor my columns for The H Open were, they none the less form a part of the free software world's history, however footling.  Of course, I have back-up copies of all of my work, so the obvious thing to do is to post them here.  I can do that, because I never surrendered the copyright, and they therefore remain mine to do with as I please.

There are quite a few of them - nearly one hundred - so I have decided to begin with two of the most popular pieces that I published in The H Open: an interview with Linus from the end of my output, and an interview with Eben Moglen from the beginning.  I will then try to work my way through the other columns as and when I have time.  Don't hold your breath....


2 comments:

  1. Hi Glyn,
    you do know that https://web.archive.org/web/20130318123010/http://www.h-online.com seems to have the H. It is probably a good idea to have a more authoritative source for your articles and repost them, but it may be less work and faster to set up links to archive.org. :)

    Best,
    Bernhard

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  2. Thanks. Yes, archive.org is a great resource, but I prefer to have some more copies available - it's sometimes a little slow, and doesn't always have completely sites.

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